Since I have the luxury of living downtown and not in a violence-prone neighbourhood, and since I don’t know anybody personally touched by violence, I look at images and reactions like the one above (found at John Fewings’s political cartoon website) and worry. I “get” cartoons like this, but I also feel a fair amount of reservation, because though a terrible thing happened there, that isn’t the Yonge and Dundas I walk through every-other-day, and we should calm down and figure out why all this stuff is happening, and figure out real ways to stop it, and not scare ourselves with hyperbole like that.
But then something will happen that blows all the rational thought out. On New Years Eve we were travelling a little after 11PM from Sherborne Station, heading for Dufferin and ultimately a midnight celebration in Parkdale. The subway was crowded and people were happy and it felt good to be back in the city after nearly a month spent in fine and exotic places that are not as interesting as Toronto. Crowds of hornblowers got off at Bathust, making noise and cheering. At Christie, the train stopped and a weird constant buzzing sound started. I had never heard the sound that the emergency strip makes when pushed. I had also never been in a car where something bad was happening, but at the next door a very angry young man was being held against the wall but two other guys. He was struggling to get free, and was staring at something/nothing in the middle distance with that awful drunk-screwed up angry face people in bar fights make. The woman next to me was repeating “you’ve got to be kidding” and then the conductor came on the PA and said “This train is not moving until the police arrive” and in a split second it was like the air changed and everybody started pouring off the train and up the stairs and outside. It was strange to feel panic in Toronto (albeit mild, but any kind of panic in this city is exceptional), and stranger still to understand that the panic is causing me to do something smart: leave. Maybe if the Boxing Day shooting hadn’t happened, I’d not have left. Maybe I would have — it’s hard to tell.
But when you see first hand one of the people scaring this city to its core, it’s hard not to think irrationally, and for the rest of the night a line from an old Ministry song that howls “fuck all these assholes” would not leave my head as much as I tried. Indeed, in the most rational way, fuck all these armed assholes, but it’s going to take extra effort not to freak out in the next little bit while we figure out how to stop this.
I’m certain that if anybody can figure out how to stop this sort of thing, it will be Toronto, because of all the reasons we love this city-unlike-any-other. But even as I write that, I’m reminded of what happened in Detroit in the mid-1960s, though the specific circumstances were different. As the rest of America seemed to burn in race-riots, Detroit was held up as a city where it could never happen, a successful model of integration and co-operation. Yet in 1967 the worst civil insurection in US history (until the ’92 LA Riots) hit that city. When it was all over, mayor Jerome Cavanagh said “Today we stand amidst the ashes of our hopes. We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough.” Recent events may have taken away the smugness we may sometimes feel in this city, which might be good, because it reminds us all the great things in Toronto don’t happen by accident, and we need to struggle to preserve what’s good, and make sure everybody can get a piece of it.
